I finally figured out what the knees do when you’re riding. It’s a weird angle, and for whatever reason I always think of the knee as a hinge joint and not the slightly more flexible joint that you can manipulate side-to-side by dropping your hip (if that makes any sense at all).

I always find drawings of how something actually is (or feels) much more appealing than drawings that have been crafted to optimize appeal. The little quirk of truth that makes me go “that IS how it is!” always gives me a charge of inspiration.

Filed under: girl, horse, sketching — Emma @ 5:08 pm

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I got berated by Scott today for being all lowdown and sneaky about having books for Comicon, and not strutting them around as one is expected to. I’m proud of the sketchbook, but it’s a SKETCHbook, and everybody else around here has got really impressive stuff to show and sell at the con - Bill Presing has got a new book of girls, Ted Mathot has got a whole new graphic novel, Derek Thompson has a new book of monsters, Jeff Pidgeon has toys and shirts and I don’t quite know what all, and Scott Morse has I think published 40 books in the past year and is painting at his booth on top of that.

Thanks to his Scott’s generosity in tablespace, you should be able to find copies of my sketchbook at the Morse/Presing/Pidgeon table, booth 4800. Possibly!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Emma @ 5:52 pm

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Back in April I posted about the fundraising art auction that the Pixar story department held to collect money for a community gathering area (otherwise known as a bar). There was so much enthusiasm from those contributing art and those bidding on it that Dice Tsutsumi, Ronnie del Carmen, and Enrico Casarosa had another idea, for a bigger auction, with artists from all over the world, fundraising for a good cause.

Thus the Totoro Forest Project was born. Parts of the Sayama forest, which is the forest which inspired Hayao Miyazaki in his creation of Totoro, are being developed into houses, malls, roads (I expect). The forest is in danger of disappearing entirely, and Hayao Miyazaki has set up a fund towards its preservation.

Artists from all over the world, in comics, illustration, and animation have contributed artwork to the auction, all inspired by My Neighbor Totoro. It’s wonderful to see everyones’ gorgeous interpretations of the idea of a forest spirit, and of course all the money will go to the fund for the preservation of Sayama forest.

More information (and all the artwork!) at the Totoro Forest Project.

My painting is gouache and watercolor, about 8×11 inches. First time painting anything with gouache… it turned out all right!

Filed under: gouache, ghibli, auction, totoro, art — Emma @ 11:24 pm

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The sketchbooks I put together for this year just arrived! I didn’t hit my mark of 50 pages of process-through-finished-piece; Afterworks, writing, and working ended up taking priority, so the 2008 sketchbook is about the size of a floppy comic issue. Five pages alone of horses!

On to specifics: Since I don’t know how to talk like a publisher, I’ll say this and hope it makes sense: the book has 14 pages when you look at it closed, but being as how it’s printed on both sides of every page (except the final page, which is only printed on one side), there are 27 pages of drawings to look at.

If you would like one for your very own, you can track me down next week at Comicon with $10 or paypal me $10 plus shipping (best to email me first to work out shipping.

Emailing me is probably the best option. I’m roving around Comicon with no table to call my own, so I may be hard to find.

Filed under: sketchbook, Comicon — Emma @ 10:56 am

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About a month and a half ago we started playing Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition, which has proven to be totally awesome, epic, and gory. The gore part is about 80% our Dungeonmaster and 20% our halfling; the rest of us specialize in other useful areas, such as trying to heal each other, being stabbed by projectiles, and making up elaborate plans involving lots and lots of rope.

All the groups I ever gamed with kept a quotes pad; gaming with animators is great because instead of a quotes pad, we keep an illustrated chronicle of the game as it happens. Sheets of paper with gags drawn on them fly just as furiously as dice in the thick of battle; and our adventures are online here, and in the Seasoned Adventurer’s Sketchbook.

Our resident awesome dragon guy is below lovingly rendered by Austin; a taste of life on the road of adventure follows.

I read online about how strategy can be useful, so we tried it, arranging marching order and advancing in an organized and precise way…

Fat lot of good it did us, too. All in all, we lost probably 300 pounds of gear, nearly 100 gold pieces, two eyeballs, a hand, a serving of innocence, and about three cups of faith.

Filed under: d&d, monsters, sketching — Emma @ 11:16 pm

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A group of us went to the Sundance Kabuki theater in San Francisco last night and saw The Fall. It’s like The Princess Bride had a baby with Baraka. The cinematography is stunning, but I was also surprised at how good the story was. There is a fantasy story being told by a paraplegic stunt man, and it’s affected at every turn by his experiences and depression. It’s at first cute and then heart-wrenching how much the little girl gets into the story, and everything you see onscreen during the fantasy segments is how the little girl is perceiving and imagining the words the storyteller is speaking. I felt that the characters were really honest - no mugging from the little girl, and the paraplegic guy had his own motivations, too.

It’s got some of the same ideas that Terry Gilliam likes to play with - some of the things that happened in the real-life storyline were played so that you as the audience could put pieces together and figure out what was going on, but they obviously went right over the little kid’s head (and would also go over the head of most any kid watching it). Terry Gilliam did this in Tideland, so much so that he felt he had to preface the movie with a disclaimer: events in this story are seen through the eyes of a child, and the things that are horrifying and scary to an adult are a completely different thing from what is horrifying and scary to a child. I have to admit that if I hadn’t seen the disclaimer and watched Tideland with that in mind, I would have been pretty sickened by the parent who gets taxidermied; but from the point of view of the kid in the movie, it wasn’t the worst thing to ever happen to her.

The Fall seems like it’s a movie where it either grabs you or you hate it. Either the beautiful pictures and swelling music and lead characters draw you in, or you hate it. It grabbed me, and drew me in, and by the end of the movie the director had me in the palm of his hand, and I didn’t know whether he was going to squeeze and crush the life out of me… or toss me into flight. That’s powerful.

I highly recommend it. It’s the best movie I’ve seen this year.

The trailer, if you didn’t catch it earlier: http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/thefall/trailer/

Filed under: films — Emma @ 6:49 pm

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This is based on a true story, in much the same way that Hollywood bases things on true stories. The true bits are that I did call AT&T, and one of their service voices DID express excitement about WALL-E and Pixar. It is more interesting for the service voice to be an actual service automated system, instead of a real person, and they didn’t get QUITE so excited about Wall-E as the automated system does. I built it up because the actual exchange was pretty tame and boring, but it made me feel like if the comic had actually happened. This is insight into the story process, guys. Pay attention. Sometimes it’s about taking an actual event that happened and distilling it down to WHY it’s memorable, and building it up again from there.

So go and see Wall-E! I think it’s the most visually striking cgi film ever made; it’s a romance-comedy-action-sci-fi-family-film, and if the movie isn’t gorgeous enough, the guys worked on the end really made the most beautiful animation to ever grace end credits!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Emma @ 12:10 pm

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Kiwis really know their art software. Artrage is great fun to play with… it’s been a while. Feels like actually drawing in a sketchbook.

Filed under: art rage, thoughts on drawing, sketching — Emma @ 5:53 pm

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You can never tell when they’re going to eat the offering… or you.  

Drawn on the Axiotron Modbook, using ArtRage 2 for the lines and Photoshop for the colors.

Filed under: artrage, monster, modbook, photoshop, sketching — Emma @ 10:53 pm

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Back at the end of March I was lucky enough to be able to tag along on a vet student field trip to the Performing Animal Welfare Society’s facilities. They’re not open to the public, as the whole point of the program is to provide exotic and performing animals a place to live peacefully after their careers are over, cut short, or after they’ve been confiscated from people unable to properly care for an exotic.

I took the opportunity to draw the animals - animals that you normally only see in the zoo, but these seemed much more happy, engaged, and energetic than the guys who live in zoos. I was happy to be able to see tigers, monkeys, elephants, and a kodiak bear up close… but sad, too, because most of the animals who live at PAWS have horrific backstories.

This is Viper, and he and his sister were lounging around in their pen, sleeping. Apparently someone declawed them as cubs, but did it the do-it-yourself-way: with garden shears. Their paws are so mangled that all they really do anymore is lounge, because walking is painful for them.

These guys were named after the Marx brothers. I’m not entirely sure about their backstory - but I think it involved a hoarder-type person, the type who keeps forty cats in their home, except with monkeys. These guys are capuchins, which I’ve never seen in zoos (but you’ve probably seen in Pirates of the Caribbean - Jack the monkey is a brown capuchin).

This was really amazing. Out at one of the PAWS facilities, asian and african elephants are kept (and forty-some tigers, which is pretty amazing, but not what I’m talking about). The five african elephants live in a paddock, about forty times as big as any enclosure you’ve ever seen an elephant in. They moved like I’ve only ever seen elephants on TV move - ears up, alert, trotting - engaged in the world around them and anticipating the buckets of vegetables that their caretakers began tossing for them! At one point one elephant ran down a hill and the other four turned around and ran to meet her. I’ve got no idea how to read elephant body language, so I was worried that we were about to see an elephant fight. It turned out to be only an excited greeting, but seeing an elephant actually run makes you realize how massive these animals are!

Filed under: lions, elephants, animals, monkeys, sketching — Emma @ 5:23 pm

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